Official information: how to improve the Quality Score of your ads

The official Bing blog has posted information on how to improve the Quality Score of your ads and web pages. Although the information is from Bing, it can also help you to get better results with your Google campaigns.

If you want to optimize your paid search campaigns for the holiday season, the following tips will help you:

Relevancy is important

Some business owners run ads on every possible keyword variation and on every synonym that they find.

While it is important to bid on many targeted keywords, it is also important that there's a connection between the keyword, the ad and the landing page.

If that relevancy is missing, you run the risk of using keywords that won't deliver results. The relevancy influences the Quality Score of your ads.

Your Quality Score can change even if you don't make changes

Just because you haven't made any changes to your campaign does not mean that your competitors haven't optimized their accounts.

If your competitors optimized their relevancy for the keywords for which you advertise, the Quality Score of your own ads will decrease.

There are three ways to improve the Quality Score

1) Improve the relevance of your keywords

How relevant are the keywords that you've chosen for your campaign?

How well do your keywords compete against your competition and other advertisers who bid on the same keywords?

2) Improve the relevance of your landing page

Are your ads and landing pages relevant to the search queries that potential customers use to find your products, services and website?

Does your website offer content that is useful to your website visitors?

3) Improve the user experience on your landing page

Is your ad highly relevant, accurate and well written and is there a strong relation between the keyword, the ad text and the landing page content?

How does your website navigation and functionality affect users?

Which Quality Score your keywords will get

1) A Quality Score of 1-5: Your keywords will get this Quality Score if it is underperforming in the market place. The keyword might not be relevant to the ad or the ad is poorly written. The click-through-rate (CTR) is lower than average.

Ads with keywords that have this Quality Score are less likely to appear when the keyword is searched.

2) A Quality score of 6: Your keywords will get this Quality Score if the CTR is competitive but not better than the average of keywords that target the same traffic.

3) A Quality Score of 7-10: Your keywords get this Quality Score if the keyword is very competitive and the CTR is higher than the CTR of keywords targeting the same traffic.

Paid search marketing shouldn't be your only way to promote your website. If your website is only listed in the paid search results, you'll miss the majority of people who would purchase something on your site.